I’m not usually a tech troglodyte, but I absolutely cannot get the hang of managing sources and inserting footnotes in my work. Writing a biography and citations are important. I’ve installed Zotero which opens automatically on ALT + Y, and I can see the sources I’ve entered there. And that’s as far as it goes. I think I’ve spent more time trying to figure this out than writing–I could have done it all manually if I knew it was going to be so tiresome. I’ve read several of the threads here that get very technical very fast and require downloading tons of add ons and honestly that sounds like BS. I know this is an issue for many of us and Scrivener should absolutely work on an integrated citation management system/
Zotero offers the ability to create a placeholder citation. Copy and paste that placeholder to the desired location in your project. Then, once you’ve Compiled the document (to .RTF), use Zotero to scan it and replace the placeholders with real citations.
Cornell University has a detailed, reasonably non-technical, guide for using Zotero with Scrivener:
Scrivener is unlikely to integrate a citation management system. Such a tool is well outside our area of expertise. Moreover, since several excellent tools already exist, it’s unclear what we could offer that would justify the costs in development and support resources.
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I totally agree there is no need for Scrivener to create a citation management system. But this is not what many users who get stuck are actually asking for (and these posts come up on the forum pretty regularly). They are asking for a simple workflow. I wrote the Bibliography wiki here and I agree that things can get technical quickly 
[1]. The Cornell article is in fact typical of this: They have two “easy methods” that are clunky and each have a caution attached. Then they have the RTF scan method with 7 steps. The RTF scan is the one I would recommend most people, but there are caveats to that workflow…
Scrivener’s compiler could generate the bibliography from placeholder citations, there are several core tools that do all the hard lifting, and these could be integrated by KB into the compiler[2] (as you already do for a bunch of your outputs). This would mean users keep using Zotero / Bookends for citation management as they should, use placeholders so no changes are needed in the editor or UI at all, but the compiled doc would have all the post-compile faffing done automatically. This would simplify the workflow for most users, with power users like me able to toggle it and use my own tools for more control if needed.
part of the complexity are the many ways to do this, and the forest of options obscures the path. But even for simpler routes like RTF scan there are a bunch of compromises along the way. RTF is not the best final format, so then you may convert to ODT or DOCX and then the styling gets lost, or something else in the document doesn’t work as expected, and… ↩︎
The simplest route would just be to replace the MMD you bundle already (that cannot generate bibliographies) with Pandoc (which can). There are separate citeproc engines that could do the citation formatting without Pandoc but these would need more work on integration (but note: many open source tools include them, so developers can and do integrate them regularly — this problem space has been solved many times). ↩︎
Try the native RTF scan method, and see if it works for you as that should be the simplest and still flexible[ish] option.
When I have time i will try to simplfy Using Scrivener with reference software (wiki) — if you have any suggestions please let me know…
I have tried to simplify the Zotero instructions here: Using Scrivener with reference software (wiki) - #4 by nontroppo
You should be able to just follow the RTF-scan instructions which are now separated from the other two more complicated options. Please see if that is any better…